Month: August 2016

Well, that was a slippery slope! Five weeks without a post, not sure how that happened, but it did. Let’s see, what’s new? I have a new mentor until roughly the end of the backend program, I’m still fine tuning the projects that are up on Heroku, I have a snazzy new resume, and I’m actively looking for an internship/apprenticeship position. I think those are the highlights, I’m sure Im forgetting something…

Firstly, the projects. Im coming to realize that it’s really hard to call something ‘done’. Although I was technically done with the projects weeks ago, and pushed them up to Heroku, they were still needed some polishing before they were ready to present. I spent probably about 3 hours on each of the projects getting the frontend styling decent enough to be presentable. There’s not a lot of uniqueness to them, but their databases work -for the most part- and that’s what counts. I hesitate to say that the databases completely work because I’m still finding bugs, mostly in the push from local host to Heroku. One particular glitch I have yet to tackle is getting the Stripe keys onto Heroku site. I cant imagine its that hard, just haven’t gotten to it yet.

I now have a different mentor. The mentor I’d been working with for this course is having a baby and is taking paternity leave, so I’ve been assigned to another programming expert. Initially I was a bit disappointed with the change, only because I am so close (2 weeks as of this post) to finishing the program. But I do think that paternity and maternity leave is super important so I just rolled with it and I am super pleased with my interim mentor.

One area I have been working a lot on recently is my LinkedIn profile and resume. I went to a meetup a few weeks ago and was told by the hiring staff of a Denver startup that he doesn’t even look at a resume if it doesn’t have some kind of graphic design element to it. It makes sense, but I hadn’t really given it much thought up until hearing that. I also figure that making my resume look interesting can only help, whereas if I were just to leave it as a plain text document it could definitely make me seem less desirable. Luckily I did spend 4 years at an art school, so I have some design experience. It definitely took some time, but I am super proud of how it turned out and am eager to show it to anyone who inquires.

That leads into my last highlight from the last few weeks, I’m looking for work! I was happy with my work on the Bloc projects, and felt really good about my ability to complete assigned stories with the group project. I feel that I have strong enough skills to be useful to a consultancy or startup as long as they are willing to provide some kind of mentorship capabilities. I mean, it can’t hurt, worst case scenario I get turned away because I don’t have enough experience, but that won’t be the case for long, and I’ll just get in touch with them again. At the very least I’ll be able to start honing my interview skills, and that in itself is reason enough to put the effort into contacting companies.

I don’t intend to let this much time lapse between posts again. It’s kind of a weird spot to be in, with all the the coursework technically completed weeks ago, and nothing really pressing that needs to get done. Like I said, I’ve been fine tuning the projects and making sure my resume and online presence is legit, but that’s not super intense work. I also realized that I needed to brush up on my pure Ruby skills, so I’ve been doing that with codewars and exercim.io. But, again, that only takes so much time, and I do get a little burned out doing challenges for the sake of doing challenges. I am looking forward to starting the frontend program and having established checkpoints to accomplish.